3...2...1...contacts

I wear gas permeable rigid contacts because my eye sight is, well, really bad. The rigid lenses allow for a sharper focus, but are not as comfortable as the soft lenses that most people wear.

I mention this because several times these contacts have become a "player" when I am in performance. Such was the case this weekend. Friday night I went out for my third scene (second character) and about two lines in I felt a light brush on my check. Then I noticed that my left eye was really blurry. Argh! Worse I could still feel the contact on my face. I attempted to hold still and still give the "animated" performance, but my desire to give the best performance possible won out, and the contact fell off my face and on to the floor. Worse I then had to run down stage and sing a song. After which Scot charged across the stage and attacked me and I leave the scene. I am followed in the scene by 5 people traipsing across the stage and then a scene change.

In the mean time I spent my back stage time applying my mustache and wondering how I would be able to drive home. Upon entering the next scene, half blind, I decided to see if I could spot the crushed ruins of my contact lens on the floor. The scene is direct address and had a false beginning, just enough time to look in the spot where it fell.

Low and behold, I see the lens, unscathed, on the floor just on the corner of the big red square in the center of our stage. In my old man persona, I bent down, picked it up with my finger and pocketed it. Game on.

This has happened before. On tour I once lost a lens during the "Pyramus and Thysbe" scene in MidSummer. I went back after the curtain call and swept the stage, and found the lens that way. I also lost one inside a gigantic dog puppet during Peter Pan, but that was because the head gear that held the dogs head to mine was too tight and it pulled my eye lids so that when I blinked the lens popped out. The first time that happened I was able to find the lens in the fur, but the second time I lost it for good and was 1/2 blind for two days. The worse was during In the Boom Boom Room, when in the climactic wife beating one of my lenses broke in half in my eye. My optometrist was both horrified and impressed. But that didn't stop him from charging me for a new one.

I guess I should get an extra pair.